Canadian Cincinnatus

Why Jon Stewart Suddenly Loves Rob Ford

Jon Stewart would be the first person to tell you that a) he is a comedian who is the anchor of a fake news show, and b) he leans left in his politics. But the difference between Jon Stewart and others on the left is he calls it when he sees it. If Obama says something over-the-top or hyperbolic, Jon Stewart will make fun of the president. Stewart has repeatedly called out Obama for failing to keep his promise to close Guantanamo Bay prison. This is refreshing because in the last few years, it has been very difficult to find anyone on the left who will make even tepid criticisms of Obama.

So it is no surprise that Jon Stewart led the charge in criticizing the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, the Justice Department targeting the Associated press and Fox news, and the cover up over Benghazi. Indeed, when Obama stated that he found out about the IRS scandal on TV, Stewart played a montage of Obama clips going back five years in which the president made the same statement about any scandal that came close to the federal government. At the end of the montage, Stewart states, "Really? I'm beginning to think that Obama learned that Osama bin Laden was dead when he heard himself say it on TV." Cue amusing photoshopped picture of Obama watching himself on live TV.

But Stewart is still a comedian on the left, and while he made a great joke about the fact that he hates it when Fox news is right, he admitted that they're right about the above mentioned scandals, even though he pretended to be unable to say the word "right" in order to get a few more laughs. So at the end of a week of scandals, he (and every other American comedian) was desperate for a scandal of the right wing. But unfortunately conservatives have been behaving very well. There have been no hypocritical divorces, no drunk driving charges, and no abuses of power.

Suddenly, enter a Canadian conservative with a scandal. Usually Canada is not even on the radar of the American media, especially the American comedians, other than the odd joke about how boring we are up north.

But thank God for Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, who is the center of endless scandals thanks to the labor friendly, left leaning, Toronto Star newspaper. They were the ones who first broke the breathless story of Rob Ford eating Kentucky Fried Chicken while he was supposed to be on a diet. The horror! Unfortunately for the Star, this rather diluted the frenzy when two of their journalists announced that they had seen a cell phone video of the mayor smoking something, which they have be told by the drug dealer who owns the cell phone is crack cocaine. The fact that the head of the gossip website Gawker backs them up didn't really help. Luckily for the Star, the American comedians were desperate for a story of a conservative behaving badly, whether there was verifiable evidence didn't matter.

On May, 21st, right in the middle of three scandals swirling close to the White House, Jon Stewart led with an old clip of Councillor Ford talking about how "Orientals work like dogs." Stewart wanted to show that Rob Ford is a fat, white racist. The fact that Ford was suggesting that Toronto city council should support and reward these hardworking Canadians was ignored because he didn't use the politically correct term: Asians. The fact that the clip is nearly ten years old didn't matter either. It was essential to establish Ford as an uneducated, right-wing thug. Now cue the crack cocaine scandal and all the jokes that a comedian can run with on that story.

Stewart wasn't alone. Jimmy Kimmel and others also spent the evening joking about Ford. CNN and other news organizations picked up the story too. Suddenly, boring Toronto was interesting, not because of the cocaine scandal, but because it was just so awkward making jokes about the real scandals in the American federal government.

Even if Rob Ford smoked any kind of drug, it is not a threat to the liberty of the people not to be targeted for their political beliefs, and it is not a threat to the freedom of journalists to scrutinize every corner of government. Ford didn't try to cover up gross incompetence that cost lives. There are very serious scandals unfolding in America, scandals that threaten the very foundations of a democracy. But for one night, all the comedians wanted to talk about was the possibility that the mayor of (what is for most Americans) an obscure Canadian city may have been smoking crack.

For one night, Toronto was finally the center of the world, but for all the wrong reasons. It was just a distraction.

 Mike Downtown

Now would be an excellent time to register a Tea Party group with the IRS

I guarantee that none of those top IRS officials, who are currently being hauled in front of Congressional committees - or plead the Fifth, have any interest in aggravating their already sticky situation any further. The IRS is in full CYA mode. This means that – for the time being – the IRS is likely behaving in a completely impartial, apolitical and squeaky clean manner.

If I were an American interested in organizing a Tea Party group, I would be filing my IRS paperwork now.

The significance and insignificance of political scandals

With Washington, Ottawa and Queens Park in full scandal mode, I have a confession to make: as a political pundit, I find most political scandals boring. 

I think the advice Ben Domenech, over at Real Clear Politics, gives to the GOP in dealing with Obama’s various scandals – IRS, AP wiretapping, Benghazi – hits the nail on the head:

“The sudden deluge of scandal which dominates the discussion around President Obama’s administration at the moment has handed a golden opportunity to Republicans. Yet if they aren’t careful, they’ll squander this opening completely by allowing their intense dislike of the president to cloud their judgment, missing the broader political lessons for the sake of personal point scoring.

Personal scandals are personal. They are tied to defects and appetites, as in the case of Bill Clinton, John Edwards, John Ensign, and a host of others. With rare exceptions, such scandals begin and end with that individual, not with their broader political philosophy.”

Domenech is correct. As long as we give individuals responsibility for the general welfare of others, or for the general welfare, conflicts-of-interest will naturally arise. We can fight it, we can try to limit it, but we can’t stop it. When the Low Information Voter says, “Ah, they’re all the same” it is in this sense that he is correct. And this is why most scandals bore me. No political party has a monopoly on virtue and if the opposition just focusses on the venality of their opponent, they are, in effect, saying that if all things were the same, except that we were in charge instead of them, this wouldn’t happen. This is self-serving and absurd.

So what should the Republicans do instead? According to Ben:

“Here’s the hard thing Republicans have to do if they don’t want this crisis to go to waste: they have to ignore their id, the temptation of the sugar high of partisan point-scoring. They must willfully set aside Obama’s presence in the fray, leaving the short term personalized attacks on the table, and go after the much bigger prize. Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is.”

“The point is that these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama’s ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government. As technological capabilities advance and the scope of government expands, the types of domestic scandals we’re seeing here are only going to increase in frequency and invasiveness, with personal information shared more frequently, easier for even low level bureaucrats to acquire and manipulate.”

 “When this period of scandal draws to a close, if the idea still survives that a more competent and ethical president would be able to effectively govern a $4 trillion bureaucracy, it will be a sign Republicans have failed. They can succeed by ignoring the tempting bait of making this about the president they despise, and focusing instead on the false philosophy of expansive government which represents the true danger to the American experiment.”

I made the same point with regard to the gas plant controversy that is plaguing the Ontario Liberal Party. If Ontario conservative leader Tim Hudak really wants to exploit Kathleen Wynn’s troubles to the max, he will use it as an example of why big government is poor government, instead of merely as a prosaic, partisan character attack on some forgettable nonentities. 

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are not remembered because they executed effective political strategy against Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, but because they selflessly championed causes greater than themselves.

This advice also applies to those politicians struggling to get out from a scandal. If Prime Minister Harper wants to put the Senate expense scandal behind him, he must champion Senate reform.

New civility watch: Jon Stewart’s producer says Oklahoma tornado clearly targets conservatives

Lizz Winstead, the ‘co-creator’ of the Daily Show, that features comedian Jon Stewart, tweeted “This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.”

She got unlikely support from Glenn Beck who tweeted “How many of us has made a joke we wished we could take back. She has to feel awful.” From the perspective of genuine tolerance, a recurring theme on these pages, Beck is quite right, of course.

However, it must nevertheless be noted that if the roles had been reversed and a conservative had gloated the same way over a natural disaster in a Democrat area, like say Hurricane Sandy, it would have been a career ender.

Incidents like this are useful to file away for the day when leftists lecture conservatives on incivility. At those times, we must throw comments like this back at them to show everybody that their civility talk is just partisan hogwash, and that they are the true political gangsters.

For this reason, I make a practice to note left-wing barbarism in this blog as it occurs.

Now is the perfect time for Harper to reform the Senate

In response to the issue of misplaced anti-terror funding, I had advised the Conservatives to do the following:

“So how does my diagnosis help out the Prime Minister? Answer: by giving him a path to follow where the opposition parties cannot tread. If Harper merely pointed out that some of this waste happened on the Liberal watch (after all, the anti-terror spending started on 9/11), he would sound partisan and evasive – and not like somebody genuinely looking for answers.”

“But if Harper were to point out that this kind of waste is endemic to large public institutions in general - regardless of who controls them - and that the real, substantive solution is to pare the government down to its essential functions, he would be able to turn the table on the opposition. By balking at his remedy without offering any real recommendations of their own, they transform themselves into defenders of the status quo. And by championing the status quo, they assume ownership of it. Trudeau and Mulcair will tie themselves in knots defending government bloat in general while damning this one particular instance of it. As icing on the cake, if they identify the source of the problem as merely the bad apples on top, they will have laid out a trap for themselves.”

It looks like Prime Minister Harper has taken my advice – at least with regard to the Senate expense scandal. Yesterday, I listened live to his speech to the Conservative caucus where he stressed the need for Senate reform. Among other things, he said, “The Senate status quo is not acceptable," and also, "Canadians want the Senate to change."

When I heard that, I said to myself, that’s it! That’s the substantive issue that can get Harper past this scandal. It is perfect. First, it directly addresses the substantive issue of Senate dysfunction in a dramatic and decisive way. Second, the Conservative Party is well placed to champion it, because Senate reform has been a Conservatives hobbyhorse for some time. As he detailed in his speech, his government has already taken many substantive steps on this front. And third, and best of all, both opposition parties are on record as opposing all of those efforts. This is the path that Stephen Harper can traverse but down, but which the opposition parties cannot take.

The Conservatives are so well positioned on this issue that one pundit (I forget which one) joked that Mike Duffy was Harper’s secret agent on Senate reform.

Harper should be pushing the issue of Senate reform as soon as possible, as vigorously as possible. When the opposition balks, it will make them look like champions of the status quo – the status quo Senate. Who wants the senate to remain the same? Answer: Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau, that’s who.

UPDATE: NDP leader Mulcair has strongly come out for abolishing the Senate after I wrote these words. This is a good strategic move on his part. It means that Harper  has to move fast if he wants to get ahead of this thing.

Barack Obama wasn’t another Jimmy Carter because Obama didn’t betray his base

Many conservative commentators had compared the Presidency of Barack Obama with that of the hapless Jimmy Carter. That Obama won his re-election bid, while Jimmy Carter lost suggests that there is something fundamentally different about Obama’s career arc.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the Nov 6 election supports a theory that I have been cultivating for a while: that it is near-certain political suicide to betray your core supporters, regardless of which side of the political spectrum you inhabit.

This points to the difference between Obama and Carter: Obama never backed away from his left-wing principles, while Carter did. While Jimmy Carter is most remembered as a bumbling, naive liberal, what is not remembered is that when the American economy was hit by stagflation, Jimmy Carter did a 180 and implemented some important free market reforms. He deregulated the trucking industry, deregulated the airline industry and nominated inflation hawk Paul Volker to head the Federal Reserve Board. Volker was probably the best chairman the Fed ever had – he broke the back of inflation with a bout of high interest rates (setting up a prolonged period of low interest rates that is still with us today), and Carter’s deregulation initiatives were the first baby steps of Reaganomics. This was good policy but bad politics. Carter got primaried from the left (Ted Kennedy) and, in a weakened state, lost the general election. The right hated him in spite of his last minute change of heart – too little too late - and the left felt betrayed.

In contrast, Obama was ideologically rock solid in 2012. While his campaign style changed completely (‘hope and change’ and ‘we are all Americans’ morphed into class warfare and crude partisanship), he did not back away from anything of substance. Though he didn’t dare mention Obamacare or the stimulus package, he never repudiated the tiniest particle of either of these initiatives. In contrast to 1980, the Democrat base of 2012 was locked down.

If you look through presidential history, there are many good examples of this phenomenon. Aside from Carter, there is George H W Bush. He lost the 1992 election largely because his broken “read my lips” no-tax-increase pledge inspired Ross Perot’s third party bid. Perot won 19% (!) of the vote. Another is the second term of George W Bush. What most people don’t remember, or want to remember, is that the unravelling of W’s second term began with his big push to amnesty illegal aliens. This initiative was profoundly hated by his conservative base. For the first time since he was elected, there was serious daylight between him and conservatives. When Katrina came along, President Bush discovered that nobody had his back. Though it is true that Bush didn’t run for a third term, John McCain’s unsuccessful candidacy looked a lot like a W rerun. He was a strong champion of every aspect of Bush’s Presidency that irritated conservatives. Not content with being the DREAM Act’s most vocal supporter and voting for the TARP Wall Street bailout, he added a few betrayals of his own, such as McCain-Feingold. Unlike most politicians, McCain didn’t wait to get elected before stabbing his supporters in the back, which might explain why he never became President.

In the province of Ontario, we have a couple of excellent examples. First there is Bob Rae, the New Democratic Premier of Ontario in the early 90’s. When he saw that running up the provincial debt with Keynesian spending didn’t get Ontario out of recession, he did a U-turn and began modestly cutting back civil service salaries with his infamous ‘Rae days’. His union backers felt betrayed, and in the 1995 election, his party was obliterated, losing 57 of its 74 seats in the provincial election. A more recent example was the abrupt resignation of Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty last fall. McGuinty had just coasted to an unprecedented third term in office (though without a majority), but after the teachers went ballistic because he suspended their collective bargaining rights in order to contain Ontario’s exploding deficit, he had no choice but to quit. With the teachers’ ire focussed on him (they were his shock troops when he first came to power in 2003), he knew he was toast.

For the textbook Canadian example of this theory in action, we can thank Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. In 1984, his Progressive Conservatives (PCs) won the greatest landslide in Canadian history – 211 out of 282 seats. He passed a historic free trade agreement with the US after winning re-election in 1988 - an election that was in effect a referendum on free trade. Unfortunately, that was the last conservative thing Mulroney ever did. From then on, he engaged in an orgy of conservative betrayal– with things like the creation of a VAT, passing draconian gun control laws and two attempts at constitutional change that would have constitutionally enshrined many left-wing principles. The result was that the Kim Campbell-led PC’s were trounced in the next federal election, going from 156 seats to 2 in 1993 - the greatest rout in Canadian history. The PC Party splitting into three: the upstart and principled Reform Party (our Tea Party), the separatist Bloc Quebecois and the rump of the old PC Party. (Seeing the writing on the wall, Mulroney and other top Tories jumped ship earlier that year, leaving an incompetent cipher at the helm.) To this day, hatred of Brian Mulroney is the one thing Canadians all across the political spectrum can agree on.

In contrast, Reagan’s conservative credentials were well established by 1984 so he romped to a history victory. That Bush 41 was perceived as Reagan’s heir apparent no doubt helped him in 1988. Of course, the same goes for FDR’s numerous re-election bids.

The only partial exceptions that I can think of are LBJ and Bill Clinton. In LBJ’s case, he lost in spite of pushing through an ambitious welfare state program because his party’s base was livid over Vietnam. In this case, it wasn’t so much a betrayal as a lack of awareness of his party’s metamorphosis: the cold-warrior wing was collapsing while the pacifist wing was growing. Clinton is a more serious partial outlier for my theory because he was successfully re-elected in spite of his triangulation with the Gingrich congress. I say partial, because the last half of the 90’s was a bad half-decade for every Democrat whose last name wasn’t Clinton and who didn’t live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Of course, loyalty to the base isn’t the only factor operating in politics. Another is the effect of the policies themselves. All the base loyalty in the world won’t help you if your policies destroy the economy. Unfortunately for America, but fortunately for Republicans, it looks like this dynamic will play out over the next 4 years.

A bad week for academic freedom

Last week, there were two nasty incidents where academic freedom got trampled by our bohemian-barbarian elites.

First up is Niall Ferguson, the distinguished Harvard historian who had remarked at an investor conference that the patron saint of stimulus, John Maynard Keynes, didn’t care about the future when he said “that in the long run we are all dead”, because he was a homosexual. This, of course, brought howls of outrage (such as this hysterical piece) from the usual suspects. As Jonah Goldberg points out, Ferguson’s argument was perfectly acceptable not that long ago. For instance, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter said, on Keynes death, “he was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.” The fact is, it is a matter of record that Keynes’ philosophy is short run, as the balance sheets of governments who have adopted his proscriptions can attest to. If this is the case – and it is, is it not legitimate to inquire into the personal motivations that led him to hold such destructive goals?

Particularly when the Queer Studies departments of universities promote things like: “’Queer Gardens,’ which ‘examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces.’” The difference, of course is that Queer Studies crowd only study the positive influence. Ferguson mentioned, in passing, a negative aspect of homosexuality. Say, if one can only debate one side of an issue, doesn’t the debate then become bogus? Shush your mouth.

Do I agree with Ferguson’s assessment of the role homosexuality played in Keynes’ intellectual life? Actually I don’t. It seems to me that Keynes, like many English gentlemen of the era, went from a homosexual youth to a heterosexual adulthood. Another example is Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, who transitioned from a young homosexual aesthete into a happily married, devoutly Catholic conservative (he hated Vatican II) who produced four daughters and three sons. But changing from homosexual to heterosexual is another one of those taboo topics polite people are not supposed to talk about.

Predictably, Ferguson issued a grovelling apology for what he said. Of course, I, nor anybody else, I suppose, believes the sincerity of that statement. It positively reeks of fear. But that’s the point. He - a world renowned historian - has to be punished to encourage the others. 

The case of Jason Richwine is even worse. In case you missed the brouhaha, Richwine was one of the co-authors on a Heritage Foundation study, which argued that the cost of the illegal amnesty, currently going through Congress, would be $6.3 trillion. Since facts like this could derail the current effort to import more Democratic voters, something had to be done, especially since they weren’t able to effectively challenge the study’s actual facts and logic. The Obama black-ops people hit pay dirt when they uncovered Richwine’s Harvard PhD thesis, which argued that Latinos have lower IQ’s than non-Latino Americans. Now, not only do the skirt-clutching PC crowd want to revoke his degree, but they want tenure revoked for the academic-all-star committee members who signed off on it, including the distinguished left-of-center sociologist Christopher Jencks.

My God. If these goons get away with that, then there really will be no more freedom to debate issues in American academia any more. As Charles Murray puts it:

“In resigning, Dr. Richwine joins distinguished company. The most famous biologist in the world, James D. Watson, was forced to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007 because of a factually accurate remark to a British journalist about low IQ scores among African blacks. In 2006, Larry Summers, president of Harvard, had to resign after a series of attacks that began with his empirically well-informed remarks about gender differences. These are just the most visible examples of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse: If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant.

In academia, only the tenured can safely write on these topics. Assistant professors know that their chances of getting tenure will be close to zero if they publish politically incorrect findings on climate change, homosexuality, race differences, gender differences, or renewable energy. Their chances will not be much higher if they have published anything with a distinctly conservative perspective of any sort. To borrow George Orwell’s word, they will have proved themselves to be guilty of crimethink.”

Read the whole thing. BTW, the James D Watson referenced by Murray is the Watson who co-discovered DNA, the single most important biological discovery in the 20^th century. And they forced him out over a comment? Fie!

What about the issue itself? Andrew Sullivan, the erratic blogger (who went from War on Terror cheerleader to Sarah Palin’s gynecologist), has presented the issue eloquently (when he is on, he is on):

“But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.

But what the Harvard students are saying is worse than creating a straw man. They are saying that even if it is true that there are resilient differences in IQ in broad racial groupings, such things should not be studied at Harvard because their ‘end result can only be furthering discrimination.’ You can’t have a more explicit attack on intellectual freedom than that. They even seem to want the PhD to be withdrawn.”

Again, read the whole thing. Hat tip Steve Sailer for both comments.

As I have said before, this hostility to honest debate is a relatively new thing in our society. It did not exist in the 1970’s, when people were fond of saying things like, “it’s a free country”. (When was the last time you heard that in casual conversation?) The intolerance of non-PC diversity is repellant and it is incompatible with a free society. We need to fight this intellectual and political pox with all our might.

About that $3.1 billion in anti-terror funding that the Federal government lost

In the spirit of bipartisanship, my comments on the federal scandal over the $3.1 billion in anti-terror funding that the Auditor General can’t find are pretty much the same as my comments on the Ontario Liberal government’s cancellation of the natural gas plants. One involves the Ontario government, the other the Federal government; one centers on electrical power, the other security; one implicates a Liberal administration, the other a Conservative. But in spite of these differences - and in spite of the fact that, in both cases, the loyal opposition is blaming the same wrong thing: inept management – the root cause is the same: governments in Canada have become too damn big.

When governments get as bloated as the Ontario government or the Federal government, the organization structure is too large to be effectively managed in a top-down, hierarchical fashion. Private businesses with this kind of a corporate structure go bankrupt, or radically restructure to survive; think GM and IBM. The same organizational limits apply to governments, but without market feedback. There simply are not enough hours in the day for our elected officials to adequately supervise everything that goes on in the organizations they are responsible for. As much as partisan hacks on the other side would be loath to admit it, scandals based on government waste will be par for the course as long as our governments remain supersized with top-down structures – regardless of which party controls parliament. 

If you want efficient, nimble government, you need small government, one that has been reduced to its core mission, and which is not pavilioned with superfluous bells and whistles enacted by over-promising politicians from elections past. 

This gives Stephen Harper an opening. Losing $3.1 billion is bad. He must do something about it. No matter how true the foregoing analysis is, it does not excuse stuff like this. If the public were to routinely forgive such blunders, even more will surely follow.

So how does my diagnosis help out the Prime Minister? Answer: by giving him a path to follow where the opposition parties cannot tread. If Harper merely pointed out that some of this waste happened on the Liberal watch (after all, the anti-terror spending started on 9/11), he would sound partisan and evasive – and not like somebody genuinely looking for answers. If the buck doesn’t stop with him, who does it stop with? The Chretien-Martin Liberals have already been punished at the polls. 

But if Harper were to point out that this kind of waste is endemic to large public institutions in general - regardless of who controls them - and that the real, substantive solution is to pare the government down to its essential functions, he would be able to turn the table on the opposition. By balking at his remedy without offering any real recommendations of their own, they transform themselves into defenders of the status quo. And by championing the status quo, they assume ownership of it. Trudeau and Mulcair will tie themselves in knots defending government bloat in general while damning this one particular instance of it. As icing on the cake, if they identify the source of the problem as merely the bad apples on top, they will have laid out a trap for themselves. For what they would in effect be saying is that if they had been in charge but everything else remained the same, things would go better. If, down the road, they find themselves in power, they will have nowhere to go when the inevitable news story of government waste surfaces.

In politics, sticking to the status quo is usually wrong. To be successful in the long term you must approach challenges dynamically. Opportunities can be found in many difficult situations, like this one. It is just that they are hidden.

What if your candidate gets in trouble with the Thought Police, what do you do?

All the political candidates getting clipped in the British Columbia provincial election by the Thought Police has got me thinking: what do you do if you are the leader of a political party in an election campaign and one of your candidates makes a politically incorrect faux pas?

The traditional solution, favoured by successful small-c conservative politicians is to lock your candidates down so much that they can’t blow themselves up. Does this work? It has, so far, for Stephen Harper.

For less successful conservative leaders such as Preston Manning, who don’t have a hammerlock on their more rebellious and ‘effervescent’ candidates, ‘Nazi eruptions’ are a fact of life. Manning’s solution was to apologize after the fact, sometimes disciplining or even firing an MP or candidate. 

The problem with the Manning approach is obvious. What is said cannot be unsaid. In the language of thermodynamics, public speaking is an irreversible process. It also meant that Manning was always off balance. No sooner had he put down one ‘Nazi eruption’ when another erupted – to the delight of Jean Chretien.

The Harper approach works better, but has its problems. For starters, backbenchers don’t like being stifled. Nor should they. As one disgruntled Conservative backbencher recently put it, “speaking is what we do here.”  Even worse, as Political Correctness metastasizes and the parameters of acceptable discourse keep shrinking, locking down your candidates becomes ever more difficult to do. After all, they have to speak on something.

I have a third approach: impose all the discipline you want on your people - behind the scenes. But if a ‘Nazi eruption’ does happen, unless that person really said something legitimately wrong - which they probably didn’t - embrace them. Wrap yourself around the flag of free speech and turn one person’s unguarded moment into a crusade for civil liberty.

If you did that, I think you would be pleasantly surprised by how many people will rally to your cause. People right across the political spectrum, including people from demographic and interest groups who normally wouldn’t be dead voting conservative, would perk up, because everybody is fed up with this constant oppression and need for doublethink.

More Fear and Political Correctness on the campaign trail in British Colombia

I thought I was finished with the topic of provincial candidates imploding over gamey comments in the BC election, but I was wrong. There is also the case of Ian Tootill.

When I first heard that a BC Conservative candidate had made a Hitler comment, I winced. I thought, among all the candidates knocked out unfairly for comments that would be considered perfectly commonplace in a healthy body politic, here we have one guy who legitimately stepped over the line.

But no. I was wrong:

‘Mr. Tootill is a freedom-loving libertarian, a first-time political candidate whose candour and outspokenness were what drew the BCCP to him in the first place.’

‘A consummate grouser and rabble-rouser, the Vancouver resident and driver’s rights advocate was recruited to the party earlier this year.’

‘His causes included but were not limited to: Slow-moving cars and trucks; photo radar; bicyclists who wear helmets; bylaws aimed at smoking, drinking and excessive noise; prohibitions on drugs such as marijuana; and what he’s described as Vancouver’s “do-gooder, controlling types.”’

Sounds like a great guy to me. But trouble awaited the outspoken candidate:

‘On Wednesday, the Vancouver Sun hauled from the Twitter vault some “controversial” Tootill posts.

“Who’s really to blame,” Mr. Tootill had typed in October, “Hitler or the people who acted on his words?”

Hitler references are trouble. Like dynamite. But Mr. Tootill wasn’t hailing the Führer or anything like that.

He said Wednesday that he can’t recall the precise context in which he invoked the name, just that it had something to do with bullying. Indeed, the record shows he was claiming that some folks are too “thin-skinned” for their own good, that they should not allow mere “words” to hurt them.

Among the responses his Tweets received was this: “The Malleus Malifecarum was ‘just words’ but led to more deaths than ‘Mein Kampf… again, ‘just words’.”

Mr. Tootill replied with his Hitler comment. He still sees nothing wrong with it.’

He shouldn’t. There isn’t anything wrong with what he said. And I am glad he is unapologetic. We have too many people in our society apologizing for things they have no need to apologize for.

What we need less of are prissy nanny staters like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who head for the fainting couches every time they hear something disagreeable; and more of plain speaking politicians, who can identify social ills with clarity, candour and fearlessness.

Ian Tootill for Prime Minister!